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Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Antebellum Slave Market

From the Baltimore Sun, "'Soul By Soul': voices of the voiceless," by Gregory Kaneon, on 13 February 2000 -- Walter Johnson, a New York University assistant history professor, has gone where no historian has gone before: inside the slave markets of the antebellum South.

Using the slave market in New Orleans as his focal point, Johnson gives readers a view of a slave sale from three perspectives: the slaveholder, the slave trader and the slaves themselves. He used as sources slave narratives, letters of slaveholders and court records of some 200 disputed slave sales.

The picture Johnson paints is unremittingly grim. Some women -- and a girl as young as 13 -- were sold for sexual purposes. Black children were brutalized to make them more amenable to slavery. Families were rendered asunder.

"Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market," by Walter Johnson

Statistics tell only part of the story. According to Johnson, of the well over 600,000 interstate sales made before the Civil War, "twenty-five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family -- many of these separating children under the age of thirteen from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the dissolution of a previously existing community."

Slave traders and slaveholders both used the threat of snatching slaves from their families and selling them "down South" to the brutal labor regimen of Louisiana --where those in bondage were often worked to death -- as a means of control. But the threat of being "sold South" also inspired occasional resistance. Some slaves successfully sought help from the slaveholders' relatives in seeking to have a sale averted. Others ran off, making themselves unsellable even if they were recaptured.

One group of 153 slaves in St. Augustine, Fla., was sold to a man in Louisiana. When a man sent to take the slaves to Louisiana arrived, he learned that 40 had run away. Later, 80 more joined them.

"It is an act of revolt on the part of the Negroes," the man wrote, "and I fear we have not seen the worst of it." Another planter had slaves either run off or die with such frequency that he had to sell his farm.

One of the most compelling tales of resistance is that of Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in New York City when he was "lured with lies to Washington, drugged, threatened with death, and put on a boat for New Orleans, where he was sold in the yard of slave dealer Theophilus Freeman."

Northrup was sold to a man named John Tibeats, who tried to beat him one day. Northrup grabbed the whip from Tibeats and lashed him instead (shades of Frederick Douglass and the slave breaker Ed Covey). Northrup avoided hanging because he was mortgaged to another slaveholder. He wasn't Tibeats' sole property at the time of the confrontation.

Northrup was one of the few literate blacks who could describe what life was like in the slave pens. But Johnson, through his book, has spoken for the unknown thousands who couldn't speak for themselves. With prose that only in spots sounds pedagogical, Johnson has given a voice to those voiceless slaves whose descendants owe it to their ancestors to read this book

Gregory Kane, a columnist for The Sun, was half of a reporting team that in June 1996 bought two slaves in Africa, freed them and then wrote a series of articles demonstrating that slavery is still practiced. (source: Baltimore Sun)

Runaway Slave Gordon. From the Smithsonian Photography Initiativ e, "Photography changes the way we record and respond to social...

Capoeira

African Martial Arts of Brazil

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s.

Charleston Slave Tags and Slave Badges

Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston.

MANILLA: MONEY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.

SLAVE CURRENCY: African Slave Trade Beads

In Africa, trade beads were used in West Africa by Europeans who got them from Venice, Holland, and Bohemia. They used millions of beads to trade with Africans for slaves, services, and goods such as palm oil, gold, and ivory. The trade with Africans was so vital that some of the beads were made specifically for Africans.

Slave Trade Currency: Cowry Shells

Long before our era the cowry shell was known as an instrument of payment and a symbol of wealth and power. This monetary usage continued until the 20th century. If we look a bit closer into these shells it is absolutely not astonishing that varieties as the cypraea moneta or cypraea annulus were beloved means of payments and eventually became in some cases huge competitors of metal currencies.

Bunce Island Slave Factory

Cannons with the Royal Crest

Adanggaman

Africans Making Slaves of Africans

Ota Benga The Man in the Bronx Zoo

Ota Benga (1883-1916) was an African Congolese Pygmy, who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York in1906

Railroads and Slave Labor

North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

Sculptor Augusta Savage

"Lift every voice and sing" by Augusta Savage: New York World's Fair.

Afro-Uruguay Spirit of Resistance in Candombe

In the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay, Afro-Uruguayans celebrate an often-ignored part of their history - Candombe and resistance.

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

W.E.B. DuBois

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Slave Tortures

Portugal Slave Trade

1501-1866 Portugal transported 5,848,265 people from Africa to the Americas.

French Slave Trade

1501-1866 France transported 1,381,404 Africans to America.

Great Britain Slave Trade

1501-1866 The British transported 3,259,440 Africans to the Americas.

Spain Slave Trade

1501-1866 Spain transported 1,061,524 Africans to the Americas

Denmark Slave Trade

1501-1866 Denmark transported 111,041 people from Africa.

United States Slave Trade

1501-1866 The USA transported 305,326 Africans to the Americas.

Netherlands Slave Trade

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" — Marcus Tullius Cicero